The name Virginia Roberts Giuffre has been inextricably linked with those of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and she has been hailed as a champion of other young victims of sex trafficking. But not much has been written about the years of physical suffering which made her final years a living hell. She tells her story in “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice,” which she co-authored with journalist Amy Wallace starting in 2021 and which Alfred A. Knopf published last Oct. 21, six months after she died.

Giuffre, who was born in Sacramento, Calif., spent her early years in Loxahatchee in Palm Beach, Fla., where Epstein lived, and escaped his clutches after he sent her to Thailand to learn Thai massage. Desperately looking for a way to escape his clutches, she found it in Robert Guiffre, whom she accompanied to his native Australia and married in 2002, raising three children. She spent the next two decades or so being a wife and mother, returning for a time to the U.S. before settling in Australia.

She spent many hours flying to places such as the United States, Britain and France, to testify in criminal and civil cases. She won substantial financial damages from various people and used some of the money to set up an organization, Victims Refuse Silence, later renamed Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR).

But then tragedy of a different kind struck, while, she wrote, she and her family vacationed at Butterfly Valley near her Australian home. Some reports have claimed that the family did not go on that holiday but Giuffre pinpointed it in “Nobody’s Girl” as the start of a downturn in her life which evidently became too much to bear.

After she returned home, she wrote, she “spiked a temperature and my head hurt like hell.” She became delirious and her husband took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed her with meningitis, most likely caused by a mosquito bite in Butterfly Valley, even though “during the trip I’d been the only one in our group slathering myself with bug spray.” Next, as she walked to the toilet, she fell to the floor and heard a cracking noise; she had broken her neck.

She recovered from the meningitis but was soon back in hospital with pneumonia. “It was as if one mosquito bite had let loose a waterfall of health problems,” she wrote.

In August 2020, doctors diagnosed her with anterior cervical discectomy and they had to go through her throat to remove a shattered disk and attach metal swivels in her neck to allow her to continue to have some mobility. Continuous pain led her to take strong painkillers and she struggled, she wrote, to avoid becoming addicted. However, she became “zoned out” on oxycodone sometimes “in my darkest hours, especially when the pain in my neck immobilized me…”

She again developed “a high fever” and the spot on her neck where she had been given a steroid injection became inflamed. Doctors believed that she was experiencing an allergic reaction to the antibiotic she had been taking after her neck surgery “but mostly they were stumped.” She also developed a staph infection on her thigh that “refused to heal.” That was followed by another bout of pneumonia. “It was as if my immune system was overloaded,” she wrote. “I couldn’t catch a break.”

And as if that was not enough, Giuffre started to experience constant bleeding, which led to laparoscopic surgery to remove cysts from her ovaries and polyps from her uterus.

The doctors, she wrote, began to wonder whether her “string of health problems were somehow related to the staph injection on my thigh, which was still not fully healed.” To her, she wrote, it seemed that her body was “staging a revolt. … My neck was hurting so much, and the painkillers I was taking were making me dizzy and disoriented.”

That was not all. She (and her eldest child) caught Covid. “Over the next several days,” she wrote, “my blood-oxygen level went lower and lower.” Her hands and feet “went numb and her left arm felt as if it had fallen asleep for good.” Her husband drove her to the hospital, where, as she lay in bed, “all my feelings of sadness and shame overtook me. I was worn out by the near-constant pain in my neck. I was weary of defending myself against vicious, hurtful words: liar, sellout, extortionist, drug addict, whore. I was sick of the nightmares: greedy men on top of me, men whose faces I recognized and would never forget, men whose faces I didn’t recognize.”

The trauma that took hold of her body she described as a “cunning enemy” which “hides in the shadows, then takes control of one’s psyche without warning.” As she lay on the hospital bed, “all my feelings of sadness and shame overtook me. … I just felt hollowed out. So when my trauma tricked my brain into telling me lies, I listened: it would be better for everyone if you weren’t here, my brain said. …The pills are on the bedside table. It will be easy. You can just quietly slip away.”

She reached for the painkillers which she had “smuggled into the hospital” and “swallowed as many as I could – later they’d estimate 240 pills – before I passed out. … My fragile self-worth had imploded. All that remained were shards of me.” But she was revived by Narcan Nasal Spray, also known as naloxone.

Asked by her husband what was going on, she told him, “I was thinking I needed to be dead.” In fact, only days later, she swallowed more pills. This second time, she was saved after her eldest child happened to look in on her. She was taken to the hospital and again revived by Narcan. “After that,” she wrote, “it would be a long time before my thoughts of self-annihilation would truly begin to subside. Only then could I promise my husband and kids that I would try with all my might to believe that I mattered.”

But she was soon diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which, she reminded, is “a chronic, long-lasting condition that causes heightened pain and tenderness throughout the body, as well as fatigue and sleep problems.”

Then, her car collided with a school bus. She was taken to a hospital, where she was informed that she now had kidney failure and given four days to live.

By then, according to some reports, Giuffre’s marriage had broken down, she had separated from her husband and was planning to divorce him and seek custody of their children – an aspect of her later life which she did not include in her memoir.

Guiffre died on April 25 at her home in Neergabby in Western Australia. The authorities have indicated that, according to early indications, "the death is not suspicious."

But even in death, her story has not ended. A legal battle is taking place in the Australian courts over her estate because she had not left a written will. And the BBC has reported that "there is still much that is not known about Ms Giuffre’s last days or her personal circumstances."

Virginia Roberts Guiffre’s book, “Nobody’s Child,” copyrighted by Alfred A. Knoff, was published in November 2025.